Ensalada de Garbanzo con Nopalitos Norteña

This is a Norteño dish. Coahuila, Chihuahua, Nuevo León, the cattle country and the high desert. It belongs to Cuaresma, the forty days of Lent when meat steps off the table and the cooks of the North turn to chickpeas, lentils, nopales, and dried fish. Easter Sunday comes and the carne asada returns, but Holy Friday belongs to plates like this one.

Garbanzo Norteño is the chickpea grown in the Comarca Lagunera and across the dry valleys of Sonora and Sinaloa. It is smaller and denser than the imported European chickpea, and it holds its shape after an hour and a half on the stove instead of falling apart. If your market sells it, use it. If not, ask. The nopalitos are scraped, diced, boiled with salt to draw out the baba, and rinsed clean. That is the technique and there is no shortcut for it. Wet nopales make a watery salad. Dry nopales make a dish that holds together.

The dressing is apple cider vinegar, olive oil, oregano Norteño, salt, pepper. That is all. The North does not lean on lime the way the coast does. Apple cider vinegar is what the cooks in Saltillo and Monclova have used for generations and it has the right cut for chickpeas and cactus. The queso Chihuahua on top, crumbled, never shredded, never melted, is what makes this Norteño. Mennonite cheese on a Lenten plate is not a contradiction. It is geography. Cada estado, su propia cocina.

My mother kept a Cuaresma rotation in her notebook. Lentejas with plantain on Mondays, fish on Wednesdays, this salad on Fridays when she could find good nopales. She wrote in the margin: 'oregano del Norte, no oregano griego.' She was right.